“... face and torso recognisably attached. In The Human Stain (2003), the ill-conceived adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, in which we are supposed to believe that Anthony Hopkins is a black man and Kidman a humble janitor, we see the Kidman rear from a different angle as she ‘is stretched out quite naked, amber, curved, ripe and Giorgione-esque’. In ...”

“... to a point, Ballard scraped away enough mortar to remove two bricks from the coalhouse wall and ‘drew out several handfuls of coal, which I divided between us’. Ballard used his share to light a makeshift stove and brew some hot tea for his mother, who was ill in bed. ‘As the glowing coals warmed my hands, I wondered what Henderson would do with his ...”

“... the baillis who first appear in the administrative echelons of the French monarchy in the reign of Philip Augustus, the armed retainers of tenth and 11th-century Japan who attached themselves to regional lords rather than to the central government, the early English factory-owners still operating, so to say, as islands in a sea of small-scale artisan ...”

“... wrong. Somehow, the subject of critics’ errors came up, whereupon my mother surprisingly drew attention to this recent one, adding: ‘Not that I read the book, of course.’ Ehhh????? ‘Well, I started it and read as much as I could stand and then flipped to the end to see what happened and saw that the fellow cut his throat and thought, I wish ...”

“... In the third movement, a solo for clarinet called the ‘abîme des oiseaux’, Messiaen drew strikingly on the musical language of birds: he thought of them as angelic ambassadors of the sky. ‘Birds represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song,’ he wrote in the programme notes. Birdsong, idiosyncratic ...”

“... was the subject’s foundations in individual choice rather than discussions of large forces that drew him. He read Mill and Marshall and was excited by Hayek’s lectures and those of the brilliant Abba Lerner. But it was Philip Barrett Whale, who worked on international trade, who prompted Hirschman’s first paper and ...”

“... in serious poems can work will be seen in Auden’s ‘Shield of Achilles’, and in many of Philip Larkin’s poems. Rhyming in Larkin amounts to invisible virtuosity: you’d notice the difference if the rhymes weren’t there, but you hardly notice that they are. ‘That Building’ is a good case of this negative brilliance. Couplets are especially ...”

“... the Civil War, famous for the ‘Water Cure’ at the Brattleboro Hydropathic Establishment, which drew on the pure springs along the Whetstone Brook. The town later produced reed organs – ‘providing music for the whole of America’ – but the once flourishing factories of the Estey Organ Company are closed now, the buildings empty in their ...”

“... being expounded to a large gathering of Spanish scientists. A distinguished French civil servant drew charts of an interlocking structure of bureaux and conseils. A Harvard professor explained that the only way to do it was to exploit the creative rivalry between autonomous Federal agencies. Sir Brian Flowers (now Lord Flowers – one of the biggest wheels ...”

“... of Hadrian (1951), her finest book and often considered the best French novel of the 20th century, drew on the surviving contemporary sources of the life and reign of the emperor, as well as more recent works in Latin, German, French, English and Italian, to imagine the dying Hadrian describing his life to his successor. Twenty years of ...”

“... is the distinguishing feature of slavery. (Here as elsewhere Skinner acknowledges his debt to Philip Pettit’s recent Republicanism: A Theory of Liberty and Government, which can instructively be read alongside his own book.) The neo-roman writers argue that liberty, the opposite of slavery, is not attained merely through the removal of interference or ...”

“... his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognised literary gifts is an ...”

“... which is said to have accommodated a thousand spectators, it was built in 1600 by the impresario Philip Henslowe, worried about falling revenues at his Southwark playhouses, the Rose and the Swan, due to competition from Shakespeare’s company at the newly opened Globe. Henslowe’s partner in the Fortune venture was his son-in-law, the actor Edward ...”

“... even claimed to fear being enslaved themselves by imperial Great Britain, a claim that drew condign derision from Samuel Johnson, among others: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ Skinner and Philip Pettit identify in resistance to enslavement a mark of the ...”

“... from 1606 to 1612 – Jamestown’s grim fledgling years. The diminished flow of the James River drew in water from the Atlantic, adding salt to the effluent drunk by the colonists. Mineral deposits extracted from Virginian caves confirm this, and show that dry summers were interspersed with cold winters. Other techniques include drilling into Scottish ...”